Lawrence Block

A couple of weeks ago, my friend, Daniella, tagged me on Facebook. “List 10 books that have stayed with you in some way. Don’t take more than a few minutes, and don’t think too hard. It is not about the ‘right’ book or great work of literature, just ones that have affected you in some way. Does not have to be in order.’

I should then have nominated 10 friends to be tagged in turn. I am hopeless at this. By the time I have got round to it, all my friends have already been tagged by someone and there is no-one left to choose. But I did write my list – pretty much off the top of my head and here it is:

Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate

L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

Sarah Waters, Fingersmith

Lawrence Block, Out on the Cutting Edge

Taichi Yamada, Strangers

Susan Coolidge, What Katy Did at School

Margaret Wise Brown, Goodnight Moon

Susan Varley, Badger’s Parting Gifts

Joyce Dennys, Henrietta’s War

Note that I am not saying these are the best or even my favourite books, just a few that have stayed with me. This list is all fiction. Maybe I’ll do non-fiction another time.

There couldn’t be a much greater contrast between two of the books I read this week: THREE CHINESE POETS: TRANSLATIONS OF POEMS BY WANG WEI, LAI BI AND DU FU by Vikram Seth and WINTER PREY by John Sandford. Seth’s three poets were writing at the time of the Tang Dynasty in the 8th century. Autumn leaves, the breeze in the pines, moonlight and mountains, peach blossom and bamboo, wood smoke and the sound of running water: these are the images that stay with me. The poems are full of a sense of transience. I read this, because I’m learning Mandarin and, being someone who learns best through sight rather than sound, I want to start getting to grips with Chinese literature. How good Seth’s translations are, I can’t yet judge. And it may be a very long time before I can! WINTER PREY I was actually re-reading. I first read this maybe thirteen years ago and it had stayed in my mind – particularly one striking passage. I hadn’t been able to put the book down and I wanted to go back and see how he had done it. And yes, it was pretty much as compelling as I’d remembered. He sets the scene – deep winter in Minnesota – brilliantly. And the part I remembered, where the main character, Davenport, is protecting a woman doctor who is almost lured to her death, was still gripping. It is a first-rate crime novel, and yet . . . I also remembered why I only read one or two more in the Prey series and why I have stopped reading novels by one or two other writers whom I used to enjoy. There is an the element of sadistic violence that I find repellent. Some writers seem to feel that they must up the ante by increasing the violence from novel to novel. I think it is a mistake on every level. Something like this has happened to Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder series and I have to confess that because they are otherwise so wonderful, these I haven’t stopped reading. But I prefer the earlier ones in the series and I really wish he’d tone it down a bit.